Automated clinical analyzers for determining the presence and levels of one or more selected analytes in relatively small biological liquid samples are widely used in hospital clinical laboratories. Preferred analyzers are equipped with an on-board supply of assay-specific reagents that are replenished by analyzing the assay demand pattern placed upon the analyzer. At a user selected time period before reagents within the analyzer's reagent inventory are exhausted, an alert message is provided so that appropriate measures may be undertaken to ensure an uninterrupted, timely supply of reagents.
For convenience and compactness within a chemical analyzer, it is desirable to store all reagents needed to conduct a single assay within contiguous compartments or vessels. Typical of such vessels is the multi-compartment or multi-well reagent container available for use in an analyzer known as the Dimension® Chemical Analyzer, sold by Dade Behring Inc., Deerfield, Ill. This multi-well container is in the form of a container strip like described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,943,030, and includes a rigid peripheral band formed integrally with each of several reagent containing wells so that the container strip generally tapers in a substantially elongated wedge-like manner from a first edge to a second edge.
To provide useful stability to the reagents between manufacture and use, it is sometimes necessary to lyophilize one or more reagents into a tablet form and to re-hydrate the tablets on-board an analyzer shortly before an assay is scheduled to be performed. During manufacture, a number of different reagent tablets may be placed in different wells within a multi-compartment reagent container and/or multiple numbers of the same tablet may be dispensed into the same well in order to provide the variety and quantity of reagent required to conduct an assay. For reasons of efficiency, it is desirable to automate the tablet loading process, however a number of obstacles are encountered during when transforming a bulk supply of tablets that have been lyophilized into carefully controlled numbers of different types of reagent tablets dispensed into specific ones of several reagent compartments.
A number of tablet dispensing devices are known, among them U.S. Pat. No. 6,478,185 that discloses a tablet vessel feed apparatus comprising a stock container for storing a plurality of tablet vessels, a vessel takeout section for taking out the tablet vessels from the stock container, and a conveyor for conveying the tablet vessels taken out from the stock container. This machine however is not suitable for dispensing into a multi-compartment container.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,348,061 discloses a tablet vessel feed apparatus applied to a tablet packing apparatus which has a plurality of feeder vessels containing different tablets respectively and packs the tablets discharged from each feeder vessel into a tablet vessel through a hopper. This machine is also not suitable for dispensing into a multi-compartment container.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,849,457 discloses a bead dispenser which is capable of preventing blockage or bridging of a bead receiving channel caused by a bottleneck of several biomaterial-coated beads at the inlet of the bead receiving channel using a spring mechanism which contacts and agitates the biomaterial-coated beads within the bead holding chamber.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,824,011 discloses a pellet dispensing device includes a rotatable cylinder having a plurality of chambers and a trigger mechanism for dispensing pellets one at a time but not simultaneously
U.S. Pat. No. 6,820,498 discloses an apparatus which enables orientation of tablets introduced into a measuring station of a tablet tester.
These and other publications are related to dispensing of single tables but none are suitable for automatically and/or simultaneously dispensing multiple tablets into different wells within a multi-well reagent container.